Gloria Steinem
People could make it against flood and pestilence, but not against the laws; they went under.
—Jorge Amado
Once upon a time, I believed that as an American, I was protected by the Constitution. When my schoolbooks cited it as the founding document of democracy, I assumed that everyone was equal before the law. Of course, I knew that the Constitution hadn’t ended slavery or included women—not even the wives, daughters, and mothers of the Founding Fathers. Still, I assumed those wise men were doing the best they could in their time. After all, even ancient Athens—the birthplace of democracy, according to my schoolbooks—had slavery and no role for women other than housewife, courtesan, or slave.
It took centuries of revolt to open up our incomplete democracy. Slavery was ended by a Civil War; the Constitution was amended so once-enslaved men could vote; and another half-century was spent marching, lobbying, and going on hunger strikes before white and black women could vote. Even then, Southern states kept black women and men away from the polls with violence, and it took a long and brave civil rights movement to get the federal government to enforce its own laws. Today, a patchwork of state laws still makes it more confusing and difficult to vote in this country than in any other developed democracy in the world. Voter turnout is lower here than in, say, India, with all its poverty and illiteracy. Recently, officials from Ohio to Texas and North Carolina have manipulated rules to keep the less powerful out of the voting booth, the one place on earth where they could equal the powerful. As I write this, the League of Women Voters has just successfully challenged the Republican-dominated Florida state legislature for redrawing congressional districts to benefit Republicans.
Still, I got a human view of the Founding Fathers only from African American history, women’s history, Native American history—everything I think of as remedial history—courses that still have to be sought out. The insights from these full-circle perspectives rarely get into the popular media.
For instance, many people don’t know that slavery was condemned long before the Civil War. Owning slaves was a hot topic of debate at the Constitutional Convention itself. Some Founding Fathers called it an abomination, and others threatened to walk out unless it was accepted as an economic necessity and an institution found in the Bible. As for the total exclusion of white and free black women, any debate about that seemed confined to the domestic sphere, as were women themselves. Abigail Adams is usually quoted as only writing mildly to her husband, John Adams, “Remember the Ladies.” Actually, she wrote him a threatening letter: “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could . . . we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”1
Rebellious women had allies among influential advisers, but since no women were allowed into the Constitutional Convention, they may not have known it. Now even the advisers have been neglected in history. Benjamin Franklin, who had been an ambassador to several Native nations and so understood more about them than the other Founders, invited two advisers from the Iroquois Confederacy to come to Philadelphia. Known to its members as the Haudenosaunee, or the People of the Longhouse, the Iroquois Confederacy was founded at least four centuries before Columbus arrived and included six of the major Native nations in North America. Power derived from “We, the People,” who met in layers of talking circles. There was no concept of slavery, women were fully included, each member nation had autonomy over its own affairs, and decisions affecting the confederacy were made mutually. Since the thirteen colonies were also striving for a central government with local autonomy, leaders of the confederacy suggested the colonies adopt a similar confederate structure. That the Iroquois Confederacy became a model for the U.S. Constitution was finally acknowledged by a U.S. Senate Resolution in 1988. The Iroquois Confederacy is now believed to be the longest-lasting and oldest participatory democracy in the world, one far more inclusive and also less dependent on military force than Athens was.
When the two Native advisers arrived in Philadelphia, they gave John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, an Indian name as a gesture of friendship. They also asked one question: Where are your women?
I wonder if Thomas Jefferson was responding to them when he famously said, “Were our State a pure democracy, there would still be excluded from our deliberations women who, to prevent deprivation or morals and ambiguity of issues, should not mix promiscuously in gatherings of men.”2
I also read An American Dilemma, the landmark study of slavery and its legacy by the Nobel Prize–winning Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. In an obscure appendix, he explained that enslaved people brought here from Africa were given the legal status of wives as the “nearest and most natural analogy.”3 All were chattel. Female children were the property of fathers or male guardians, and after marriage females died a “civil death” because husband and wife were one person, and that person was the man. Lawyers of the day argued that a wife could no more sue her husband than a man could sue himself. There were life-and-death differences, but neither enslaved people nor any women had a legal right to their own children, to any earnings from their work, to go to school, to enter an agreement, to appear in public, or to leave their masters’ homes without danger of being legally and forcibly returned. Though abolitionists supported the Underground Railroad of enslaved people escaping the South, some condemned Susan B. Anthony for helping wives and children escape brutal husbands and fathers. As Paul the Apostle said in the Bible, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands as unto the Lord.” This and other religious justification of female subservience so outraged Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she gathered a team of twenty-six women, rewrote the Scriptures, and published the Woman’s Bible—a book so controversial that it damaged her reputation and almost sank the suffrage movement.
Even up to the 1940s—a century after the end of slavery and a half-century after women won the vote—Myrdal could report, “In drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture.”
So what did I learn from this more human view of the Constitution and its framers? I began to realize that the greatest gift of the Founding Fathers was not democracy, but the contagious idea of democracy, not a perfect Constitution, but one that could keep changing. Indeed, they may have recognized their own imperfections better than we do. For instance, the Founders not only rejected Europe’s model of lifetime leadership but also elected leaders for limited terms and made them impeachable during those terms, as in the Iroquois Confederacy. The Constitution itself could be amended. Its first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and other protections for the individual—were added just after the Framers had finished the Constitution, and then realized it dealt with the state but not citizen power against the state. They went back and fixed it.
I wondered: what would have happened if the Founders actually had looked like the country? I think the Bill of Rights would have included reproductive freedom. After all, black women were forced to bear children who became slave labor, and white women were so pressured to populate a white country that on the frontier the average family was a two-mother family: the first wife died from too many childbirths, and the second wife cared for those children and gave birth to more. Early tombstones show the reason why women’s life expectancy was far shorter than men’s: died at seventeen in childbirth . . . died at twenty leaving six beloved children. . . .
This was so common that shocked Native American women referred to European American women as those who die in childbirth. Native societies were based on a balance between women and men, people and nature, and a traditional knowledge of herbs, abortifacients, and timing allowed women to decide when and whether to give birth. In the Europe that colonial women had come from, 6 to 8 million women healers had been murdered as witches over a period of three to five centuries, thus wiping out their knowledge and allowing patriarchal religions to control reproduction. In upstate New York, for instance, European women knew their Native neighbors and even had Sunday dinners with Seneca women, thus discovering Native birthing methods and cultures that may have inspired the suffrage movement. I bet Native women would have included reproductive freedom in the Bill of Rights and women as full citizens in the Constitution.
After women finally won the right to vote in 1920, the next step was prohibiting discrimination based on sex in almost every arena, from serving on juries to entering into financial transactions, and that required an Equal Rights Amendment. Though the Fourteenth Amendment promised “equal protection under the law,” it had been passed in the wake of the Civil War with no intent or instance of including sex. In the late 1920s a group of suffragettes led by Alice Paul drafted the text for a constitutional amendment that would make sex a suspect category, along with race, religion, and national origin. But the movement never got off the ground and never came to a formal vote in Congress. The fight for an ERA would never be easy. For instance, unions had opposed the ERA because they saw it as in conflict with protectionist measures they had won for women workers. Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sided with the unions, not equality. It wasn’t until the Second Wave of feminism in which feminism was reborn in the 1960s that these protections were either eliminated as unnecessary or expanded to apply to men, too. Then the twenty-six simple words of the ERA became a battle cry again: Equality of rights under the law shall not be abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
I and countless others entered into this struggle: testifying in Congress, cheering in 1972 when the ERA finally earned the two-thirds majority in Congress necessary for a constitutional amendment, and campaigning state by state for ratification by the required minimum of thirty-eight state legislatures. Congress had imposed a seven-year deadline on ratifying the ERA, and only after much additional campaigning would the deadline be extended to ten years. Meanwhile, thirty states ratified within the first two years, and that lulled the pro-ERA forces into a false sense of security. This was often compounded by our own error in seeing the ERA as an old and uncontroversial thing instead of what it was and is: a major way of redistributing wealth by requiring fairness for the biggest unpaid and underpaid workforce in the country—women of all races.
But right-wing economic and religious forces woke up to this danger. They began a national anti-ERA campaign with two major, if contradictory, arguments. First, they argued that the ERA would damage, not help women: it would integrate bathrooms; send women into the draft and combat; eliminate support for homemakers; require birth control and abortion by encouraging women to enter the paid labor force; legalize gay marriage; and generally destroy the family, society, and, in the right-wing view, Western civilization as we know it. Second, the ERA was not needed because women were already equal under the Constitution.
Neither argument was true. Both were effective. A major reason was that not one major newspaper, radio network, news service, or national television network did an independent investigative report on what the ERA actually would and would not do. Media were content to give equal time to each side and create debates with far more heat than light. Often the viewer or reader was more confused after watching the coverage than before. Indeed, surveys showed that journalistic coverage of the ERA actually increased confusion. Reporting rarely included the Amendment’s twenty-six words, though in public opinion polls, over 60 percent of Americans supported them when they read them. In the end, the Equal Rights Amendment fell just three states short of the thirty-eight required to get it into the Constitution. It was pronounced dead—at least in that process—in 1982.
In retrospect, I think the anti-ERA forces succeeded for a mix of reasons. First, they knew very well that equality would cost a lot of money, from equal pay itself to equalizing actuarial tables and insurance rates, and they were motivated to stop it. Second, they had crucial influence in many state legislatures where business interests reign. For instance, insurance was the last major national industry regulated by state, not federal, government, so the insurance lobby often had great power there. Indeed, the most frequent occupation of a state legislator was insurance agent, whose company profits would be diminished by eliminating sex-based actuarial tables. Third, many or most anti-ERA women were operating out of an unfounded but well-cultivated fear that the ERA would weaken rather than strengthen their ability to be supported as dependent homemakers or to get child support if divorced. They gave the press an image of women against women.
We in the pro-ERA majority also share blame. First, most Americans didn’t (and still don’t) know the names of their own state legislators, much less how they vote. Most Americans were (and still are) even less likely to vote in state elections than in national ones. This leaves the majority vulnerable to a focused minority. There is also little understanding that state legislatures draw and redraw congressional districts, thus influencing the House on everything. (The Senate tends to represent majority views better because you can’t redistrict a state.) Second, we were so focused on each state that we may not have run enough of a national campaign, and people see more national than local media. In public, Phyllis Schlafly, previously a little-known veteran of the John Birch Society and several unsuccessful political campaigns, was the face of the anti-ERA campaign. Because she was pretty much the only female foe of the ERA the media knew, you might say she was an artificial creation of the Fairness Doctrine, whose requirement that broadcasters air opposing views in controversial issues (regardless of their validity). It was appearing opposite a variety of ERA supporters that led to Schlafly’s fame. (In my experience, a media interviewer would call and say, “Bring an anti with you.”) Indeed, as I write this in 2014, Schlafly is still being interviewed about the issue and told one re-porter that the pay gap between women and men should increase—not only because women don’t choose the “difficult” jobs but also because women prefer to marry men who earn more than they do.
Third, and perhaps most important, most Americans, women and men, just didn’t (and still don’t) know the practical improvements the ERA would make in our daily lives. This is the great value of the book before you. Equal Means Equal explains in a clear and compelling way why the Equal Rights Amendment continues to be needed. It tells you in practical terms how it could be used to create more equality and justice in the daily lives of millions of Americans, both women and men. Once you read it, I think you, too, will see the ERA as crucial to Americans of all races and economic groups. It’s about time.
To brace you for the biases implicit in some of the arguments against the ERA, here are two examples from my past experience. First, from The Thunderbolt, a publication of the National States Rights Party: “Laws requiring men and women to be separated in prison would be invalidated [by the ERA]. A Negro judge has already used these equality laws in Chattanooga to lock a White woman in the same cell with a black man. She was then raped.” Obviously, the right to privacy would prevail and the ERA would not integrate prisons or bathrooms—and doesn’t in states with statewide ERAs—but this argument should prepare you for the intertwining of sexist and racist fears of equality. Second, from a Florida anti-ERA television commercial: scenes from a Miami Dolphins football game represented America without the ERA, and then footage of the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade represented America with the ERA. As outrageous as the TV ad itself was the fact that anti-ERA forces didn’t have to pay a sympathetic TV station that ran it free on the false grounds that equal unpaid time was required to balance paid time that local ERA groups had spent months fundraising for.
It’s also true that the grassroots support for the ERA created a decade of marches and rallies in Washington that rivaled the first one I ever witnessed: the famous march led by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964. Now, in the age of the Internet as an organizing tool plus a better understanding of how deep inequality cuts, there are opportunities for such massive marches in every state capital.
Most of all, this book will break through the artificial smokescreen of false confidence that the Founding Fathers were omniscient, this is the most perfect democracy, any inequality is due to personal fault, and the Constitution protects us against all injustice.
The truth is that our democracy is a work in progress. We are all its Founders. We are all learning that we are linked and not ranked.
Since we also know that long before the Founding Fathers a greater equality existed on this same land, we can create it again.